Aldo Leopold Quotes

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.

Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.

The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts

In wildness is the salvation of the world.

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.

That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.

The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.

Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?

The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy - it is already too late for that - but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.

He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.

Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.

A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.